Tickets

10 films for $50 with punch card
$8 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Film Students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

A Film Unfinished

Muenzinger Auditorium

The Nazi propaganda machine's mission was simple if despicable: Use carefully selected words and images to justify dehumanization and genocide.

There's nothing simple, though, about A Film Unfinished, a remarkable new documentary that reminds us of film's inherent capacity for lying.

Director Yael Hersonski takes familiar footage of life in the Warsaw Ghetto and turns it into a macabre and somehow poetic hall of mirrors. Her ace in the hole: lost outtakes, recovered in 1998, showing how Nazi film crews directed Ghetto life to make it look tolerable. With the help of a cameraman's testimony and the diaries of Adam Czerniaków, Warsaw's Jewish council leader, we take in the staging of a live show (audience members were forced to laugh or else) and an elaborate feast, a cruel joke at a time when only the most fortunate Ghetto residents were lucky enough to eat horse meat. The emaciated faces we see here are walking ghosts: The Ghetto was liquidated and its residents executed shortly after the footage was shot.

We also see some of today's Ghetto survivors watching the footage alone in a dark theater. "Jews didn't bury their dead in coffin!" exclaims one survivor with disgust as she sees staged footage of a funeral procession. Indeed, as other parts of the footage show, corpses were often left lying on the Ghetto streets. In one sequence we see how film crews directed residents through multiple takes to walk past the dead bodies without paying heed. The Nazi suggestion: Only subhumans could behave in such a way. Propaganda works in many different ways.

A Film Unfinished, which showed earlier this year at VideoFest, takes abject imagery and turns it into an essential statement on why we bear witness. The film pulls back the curtain on a deadly PR machine and forces us to consider its deceptions.

A Film Unfinished

Looking for a gift for a friend?
Buy a Frequent Patron Punch Card for $50 at any IFS show.
With the punch card you can see ten films (an $80 value).

Tickets
IFS tickets are only available at the door on day of show. With 400 seats and
rare sell-outs, by arriving a bit early you're almost certainly guaranteed a
seat. We're happy to save seats for anyone traveling from afar--just let us
know how many people are in your group by email. Tickets go on sale 30 minutes
before showtime.

IFS screens films in Muenzinger
Auditorium, west of Folsom Football Stadium. First Person Cinema events screen
in the VAC basement auditorium on select Mondays. Celebrating Stan screens
in ATLAS 100. Admission (unless otherwise noted): $8 general admission, $7 w/UCB student ID,
$7 for senior citizens. We give a $1
discount to anyone with a bike helmet, and you can see movies for free on
your birthday, or if you are assisting someone in a wheelchair. Credit cards
are accepted at the door

If you want to be
guaranteed a seat please arrive early. Tickets go on sale 30 minutes
before showtime.